Arts and Crafts gems shine in Berkeley's velvet hills

R.W. Apple Jr., New York Times

Published
4:00 am PST, Wednesday, January 29, 2003

"Westward the course of empire takes its way," wrote the 18th century Irish philosopher Bishop George Berkeley, so the 19th century founders of a little city directly across the bay from San Francisco, almost at the western extremity of the American empire, chose to name it after him.

Many famous men and women have walked its streets -- Ernest O. Lawrence, the remarkable physicist who invented the cyclotron; Clark Kerr, who helped develop the nation's best statewide system of higher education; Mario Savio, the leader of the radical Free Speech Movement during the turbulent 1960s; and in our own day Alice Waters, arguably the nation's greatest restaurateur.

Another -- too little known, at least beyond Northern California -- is the architect Bernard Maybeck, a precursor of the modern movement like Otto Wagner in Vienna, Charles Rennie Mackintosh in Glasgow, Victor Horta in Brussels and the brothers Charles and Henry Greene in Pasadena.

Much that he saw and so brilliantly succeeded in grasping still stands today in Berkeley, on and near the campus of UC Berkeley and in the hills above it, in the north side neighborhood where Maybeck lived for most of his life (1862-1957). More than anyone else, he made Berkeley one of the nation's architectural treasure-troves.

MOSTLY STREET VIEWS

Although few of the buildings are open to the public, the most important one is, and most of the others can be viewed from the street.

On the hillsides, some houses stand on the cusp of the wilderness. Eucalyptus scents the air. Towering conifers frame sweeping views across to Alcatraz and, in some cases, all the way to the Golden Gate. Monkey puzzle trees and cypresses deformed by the wind provide sculptural punctuation to the compact houses, which are tucked deftly into their sites.

Maybeck's roots were in the Arts and Crafts movement. Along with a poet, publisher and aesthetic theorist named Charles Keeler, and others, he worked to turn the "seismically unstable and intellectually volatile Berkeley hills," as the architecture writer Allen Freeman described them, into an Arcadian garden landscape, dotted with rustic wooden houses.

In the strait-laced Victorian era, their countercultural way of life must have seemed almost as far out as the present-day pageant of nonconformity on Telegraph Avenue, between Bancroft Way and Dwight Way, where hippies, punks, Rastafarians, Trotskyites and anarchists mingle with students.

Another Arts and Crafts architect, A.C. Schweinfurth, designed in that style Berkeley's most famous building, the First Unitarian Church (2401 Bancroft Way, 1898), which is now used by the university's dance program.

Maybeck and Keeler were members of that church. A small, brown-shingled building, it is a piece of the forest in the city, with deeply overhanging eaves supported by redwood tree trunks with the bark left on.

FIRE SURVIVORS

Many of Maybeck's important early houses were destroyed in an awful fire that swept Berkeley on Sept. 17, 1923, but the Isaac Flagg House (Shattuck Avenue near Eunice Street, 1901), with superbly preserved redwood paneling, and the Schneider-Kroeber House (1325 Arch St., 1907) bear charming witness to an era of artistic modesty; both are reworkings of Swiss chalets.

The Faculty Club on the campus (1902-03, later additions by others) has the same bosky, unpretentious feeling, but it looks ahead to the eclecticism that marked Maybeck's later buildings. A Mission-Mediterranean exterior hides a Nordic-Gothic great hall, with stained-glass windows, a high-peaked ceiling with exposed timbers and a formidable fireplace.

That eclecticism reached a climax in Maybeck's masterpiece, the First Church of Christ, Scientist (Dwight Way at Bowditch Street, 1910, open briefly to the public after services Wednesday evening and Sunday morning).

It and the Palace of Fine Arts in San Francisco, a gem of romantic neo- Classicism, are the two Maybeck buildings known to everyone interested in architecture.

Shoehorned onto a corner site, the building is an amalgam of styles but a copy of none. Combining a Byzantine form, a Mediterranean pergola covered with wisteria, industrial steel windows, cement-asbestos panels, and fluted concrete columns with capitals that vaguely recall those at Vezelay in France, "only a wizard like Maybeck could have kept it from being visually chaotic," as Sally B. Woodbridge writes in the biography "Bernard Maybeck: Visionary Architect" (Abbeville Press, 1992).

INSPIRING INTERIOR

Inside, four great wooden trusses, embellished with Gothic tracery, meet in the center of the auditorium, forming a kind of hood above the worshipers' heads. Suspended from the ceiling are fixtures shaped like shallow bowls that direct soft light upward, creating a magical effect by night.

Unhappily, homeless people often set up a grubby camp in the portico-shaded entryway that leads into both the church and the Sunday school.

No such unpleasantness mars Rose Walk (1913), a steep set of stairs that descend gracefully from LeRoy Avenue to Euclid Avenue, beneath luxuriant foliage and past light stanchions also designed by Maybeck.

It is flanked by well-sited shingle and stucco houses and duplexes built later by other architects, whose tile roofs and balconies help to unify a miniature community that affords rare privacy to its residents.

Farther up in the hills lies a tract of land called La Loma Park, which Maybeck purchased with several friends. There, mostly on what is today Buena Vista Way, he built a number of houses between 1907 and 1933, several of them occupied for a time by himself and his family. They constitute a living catalog of innovative work.

The oldest of the group (1515 La Loma Ave.) was built for Andrew Lawson, the geologist who first mapped the San Andreas Fault. Memories of the 1906 earthquake were still quite vivid, and Maybeck conceived the idea of building a quake-resistant Pompeiian villa using reinforced concrete.

Again, as in the church, he gave humble materials a certain grandeur. Unable to afford the luxurious stone that he wanted, he mixed colors with concrete before pouring it and embedded gilded glass tesserae in it.

TROLL'S QUARTERS

At 2780 Buena Vista (1933), Maybeck built a marvelously idiosyncratic house for his daughter, Kerna, that looks as if a troll might inhabit it. On a corner lot cut into the hillside, it has a horizontally ribbed concrete chimney, redwood and Douglas fir siding and a shingle roof partly covered with moss.

It looks smaller than it is; inside, a single large room occupies the main floor, with a handsome wooden roof supported by struts that curve like the ribs of a ship. Maybeck and his wife, Annie, lived there late in life.

The two earth-colored chalets that make up the Mathewson house and studio (2704 Buena Vista, 1915) sit birdlike on their hillside, as if about to take off.

The Sack House (2711 Buena Vista, 1924) is an inexpensive structure made from burlap bags dipped in an experimental aerated concrete known as Bubblestone, then hung to dry over chicken-wire or slat frames.

Maybeck left no followers as such -- he was far too much of an individualist -- but one of his early associates was Julia Morgan, a pioneering woman architect. She designed William Randolph Hearst's San Simeon, and, on a much more modest scale, St. John's Presbyterian Church (2640 College Ave., 1908-1910), now used as a theater.

On a tiny budget (a quarter of that available to Maybeck for his nearby church), she created a low, powerful, unadorned wood building with the framing elements exposed.

Greene and Greene built little in Northern California, but Berkeley has their elegant Thorsen House (2307 Piedmont Ave., 1909), now the Sigma Phi fraternity house, and it should not be missed on any architectural tour of the city.